Friday, 9 August 2013

Voice Morphing by J B Turner

Today's guest blog is by thriller writer J B Turner who is a former journalist. Hard Road his debut novel was published by Exhibit A and his next novel Hard Kill will be published in July 2014.

There
is a fine line between fact and fiction. Lines get blurred. Did that actually
happen? Did they actually say that? Were they misquoted? Never is this more
true than a statement delivered by Gen. Carl W. Steiner, former Commander-in-chief, U.S. Special Operations Command.

“Gentlemen! We have called you together to
inform you that we are going to overthrow the United States government.”

The
problem was that although the voice sounded remarkably like him, it was not
Steiner.

It
was in fact the result of voice “morphing’ technology, developed at the Los
Alamos National Laboratory in New
Mexico.

What
happened was scientist George Papcun recorded a 10-minute digital recording of
Steiner’s voice. Then in near real time, he managed to clone speech patterns
and developed an almost perfect replica.

It
was said that Steiner was so impressed, he asked for a copy of the tape.

Researching
for my thriller Hard Road, I came across this information. And I incorporated it
into my storyline where a former National Security Agency voice analyst, Thomas
Wesley, intercepts what appears on the surface just to be an innocuous, albeit
annoying 1980s pop song by The Bangles. But when Wesley digs deeper, he
realizes there is an encrypted conversation, which talks of an imminent
terrorist attack.

The
voice on the intercept is not, however, the actual
voice it at first appears to be.

Wesley
is so concerned he contacts an old college friend, a Congressman, and asks him
to listen to the real conversation identifying the actual person, as opposed to
the voice clone.

Voice
morphing is also known as voice transformation and voice conversion and is the
software-generated alteration of a person’s natural voice. The purpose could be
to add audio effects to the voice, to obscure the identity of the person or to
impersonate another individual.

It
also has its military applications, most notably psychological operation,
PSYOPS.

Former
intelligence analyst and acclaimed Washington Post journalist William Arkin
said: “Being able to manufacture
convincing audio or video . . . might be the difference in a successful
military operation or coup.”

American’s
military planners started to discuss digital morphing after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Covert operators
are said to have come up with the idea of creating a computer-faked videotape
of Saddam Hussein crying or in some sexually compromising situation. The plan
was for the tapes to be sent into Iraq and the Arab world. But it
never made the light of day.

Voice
morphing has distinct possibilities in military psychological warfare and
submersion. For example, it could be used to provide fake order to the enemy’s
troops, appearing to come from their own commanders. What if the voice of a
rebel leader urges his followers to lay down their arms?

Former
American Secretary of State Colin Powell was another whose voice was morphed and
he was heard to say, “I am being treated
well by my captors.”